Blog P.I. covers the intersection of politics and technology, but Rick Klau stands at the center of it: before becoming a vice president at FeedBurner, he was a delegate for Howard Dean, held positions with several dot com-era startups and even clerked at the EFF.
And as he wrote at his personal blog last weekend, he’s pretty sure that he was present at the creation of online political networking in the form of the Clinton@Marist listserv, a discussion group hosted on a server at Marist College:
Formed in August of ‘92, it was the first use I know of by a presidential campaign of the Internet. Part discussion list, part campaign coordination tool, part rapid response vehicle – hard as it is to believe, it was politics on the Internet before there was a Web.
And as Klau points out, the archive from 1995 to 2007 is on the web, but the critical campaign-victory-honeymoon-inauguration pre-Gingrich period from 1992 through 1994 remains bured in an ancient tomb… er, FTP server at Marist. Klau is looking for a way to make the complete archive available, but until then he’s started sharing interesting excerpts. I, for one, certainly look forward to seeing the whole thing.
On a related note, this Christmas my sister gave me a copy of “Electronic Whistle-Stops: The Impact of the Internet on American Politics” — originally published in 1998 — and I’ve just started reading it this week. Assuming there are online political curios, gewgaws and objet d’arts to be unearthed, look for Blog P.I. to do some excavating of our own.
